PC-BSD® has been pre-configured to support most multimedia formats and makes it easy to install most open source media applications using AppCafe®. In addition, the following Control Panel icons are available, regardless of the desktop:

Sound Configuration: this utility displays the recognized audio devices and allows you to select and test which device to use by default.

"PulseAudio Configuration" and "PulseAudio Mixer": PC-BSD® provides full PulseAudio support. These utilities can be used to configure discoverable network sound devices and mixer levels.

Mount Tray: this application automatically detects the insertion and removal of media in USB devices. This means that any desktop should notify you if media is inserted into a USB CD/DVD device.

If you insert a CD/DVD media into an internal CD/DVD device and your desktop does not notify you, you can still mount the media manually as the superuser. This command will mount a CD inserted into the first internal CD device:

mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /media

If you install your web browser using AppCafe®, you should be able to play most media formats, including YouTube videos, Internet radio, and many trailer and movie sites.

If people are blue in YouTube videos, this is due to a known issue in flash which Adobe hasn't fixed for open source players. To resolve this issue, right-click an area in the video, select "Settings", then uncheck the box "Enable hardware acceleration". Alternately, use the Minitube PBI to watch YouTube.

If you happen to come across a file that you can not play in a web browser or media player, it is probably because it is in a proprietary format that requires a licensing fee or restricts distribution of the codec that is required to play that media format.

AppCafe® contains several dozen applications for playing and editing multimedia. It includes these popular applications (click the links to view screenshots):

aTunes[1]: full-featured audio player and manager that can play mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip audio CDs.